★ Back on RSS

With the demise of Google Reader a couple of months ago, my use of RSS had dropped to a halt. I had exported my data, got a list of all the feeds I had in there but I still lacked a service to replace Google Reader.

I tried Feed Wrangler for a while but it didn’t stick (nothing against the service, the smart feeds function just doesn’t fit the way I like to read my news feeds). After a couple of weeks of not having an RSS reader at all and probably missing all sorts of fun things (not thinking about tech news stuff, but about blogs of people I know and/or follow, WordPress and front-end news and writings, etc..), Reeder came out with an update for their iOS app and that sparked my interest again. Not that I missed reading news or anything like that. But having a place where you can gather these things is nice to have.

I bought the app (? 4,49) and had a look at the syncing services it supported. Having tried Feed Wrangler, not liking Feedly and not wanting to host Fever myself, I looked into Feedbin. $3/month or $30/year is a steal for something you’re going to use everyday so I got myself an account (and I’m a firm believer in supporting the sites/apps/products you use, not everything should be free).

With that I had an RSS reader again, and an app to use it on my iPad (which is my preferred reading device for anything internet, the Kindle is still King in book-land). But there was one more thing to do.

Lots of internet services have the option to favourite something, to like it, to give it a star, etc…you get the point. But what happens to those “favs” after that. Nothing, that’s what. Well, I like to get my favs out of the specific service and gather them all together in Evernote. (I can hear a couple of you thinking: “Evernote, that’s just another service that you can’t get your data out of when it shuts down” – Well, I think by now Evernote is a well established company that is not going anywhere anytime soon.)